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Profile: The field medic

Nature volume 466, pages 22–23 (2010)Cite this article

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When emergencies happen in remote settings, field researchers can be left with little recourse. Erik Vance meets a man trying to change that.

It started with a minor cut. A rock had come loose during a palaeontological dig and grazed a worker's leg. But when Matthew Lewin checked on him several days later, an infection had spread to his blood. The man had a dangerously high fever and was close to kidney failure. The most serious complication, however, was his location: a remote sun-blasted corner of the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, where he was working as part of a 2005 expedition searching for fossils from the Cretaceous period. Most patients in his condition would be admitted to a hospital's intensive-care unit. "With good roads it would have been a two-day drive to the nearest hospital," says Lewin. Where they were, the roads were terrible.

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References

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Authors
  1. Erik Vance
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Erik Vance is a freelance writer in Berkeley, California.

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Matthew Lewin's website

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Vance, E. Profile: The field medic. Nature 466, 22–23 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/466022a

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